Stages Of Grief
by Jade II
Summary: Three short Zoe centric pieces set during and after the movie. Contains major spoilers for the movie.
1. Silence

**Silence**

Silence.

Over the top of it, muffled shouts and thumps from behind the blast doors where Zoe only hoped that River was still doing her thing, and not dead and being fought over by the passel of hungry Reavers she had gone in to fight.

Next to that, Kaylee struggling to start breathing again after getting the antidote for whatever it was she had been hit with.

Behind that, Simon's pained voice instructing Inara on how to treat his bullet wound.

Overall, it was best to just listen to the silence.

Zoe propped her gun up against her leg and tried to not think about the strong stinging all up her back, or how small the chances were of getting out alive...

Or Wash.

She set her jaw, chasing him from her mind.

But she had never been terribly good at that.

He trickled back into her thoughts through one of the little, almost non-existent cracks in her walls that always seemed to open up just for him.

The muscles in her jaw tensed so much she thought they might snap with the pressure with which she was trying to keep him out.

Then Zoe heard Jayne whimper in pain through the silence, and the mental flinch this caused within her made the cracks widen just that little bit more and let Wash come streaming through.

He was all she could see, all she could feel, all she could hear...

His head fallen forward in the red of the emergency lights.

His skin cold and clammy against hers.

The absence of his voice in the silence.

Zoe swallowed back tears. She couldn't break down now; any second now she could be called back into action against any number of threats.

But the silence...

Wash, her Wash, the one she should able to count on to make her feel halfway human again if they ever got out of this, he wasn't there. He wasn't coming back.

...How could she be human without him?

If he were here right now, he would be cracking jokes, making light of the situation, letting her smile in the face of death because she knew he was by her side. He would be touching her, his hand on her shoulder, her knee, words of comfort not being spoken but nevertheless present and acknowledged. Every time she looked in his eyes she would see into his soul and resolve once more to survive at all costs, for him.

But he wasn't there. All there was was silence, darkness, emptiness. And that was all there would ever be from now on.

Again, Zoe pushed back tears and forced herself to focus on the job.

But for the first time in more years than she cared to count, she hoped that this would be the one she didn't come back from.

She waited, trying not to hear the silence.


	2. Dress

**Dress**

She wore her wedding dress, in the end.

She knew Wash would have laughed at her, of all people, agonizing over what to wear, but she also knew that, of course, he would understand.

The only other dress Zoe owned was the one Wash had given her for their last wedding anniversary. She remembered the almost child-like glee with which he had watched her unwrap it; "It's a slinky dress!" he had exclaimed when she had held it up to look at it. She hadn't worn it since that night, but her husband's funeral was hardly the occasion on which to give it a second airing.

So she had put it back in the closet and looked at the rest of its contents.

Most of the space was taken up by Wash's shirt collection. A couple of his jumpsuits also hung on his side of the railing, along with a few threadbare pairs of pants. None of these seemed remotely appropriate, although of course Wash would have loved to see her in his clothes…

Her own side of the closet was hardly much more likely to yield anything suitable. Zoe's clothes were functional and really not much else, and whatever combination thereof she might choose would either look mismatched or so everyday that no one would be able to tell she'd chosen it special at all.

She had sighed, feeling a sting make itself known behind her eyes. She pushed it back, as she had done so many times in the past day, and tried not to stare at all those useless clothes quite so forlornly. Maybe she could borrow something from Inara, she thought… and then quickly dismissed the notion. Wearing something not her own seemed just as wrong as any of the awful mundane things hanging in the closet in front of her.

She had nothing to wear.

And somehow, this simple thought broke through all her carefully constructed barriers, and she found herself sobbing, more loudly than she could remember ever sobbing before.

Her vision blurred from the tears and she stepped back, aiming to fall back onto the bed, but she misjudged the distance completely and ended up collapsing backwards onto the floor.

A vicious jolt shook her as she landed, and her back scraped violently down the side of the bed, but she barely noticed. Her mind was awash with guilt (maybe if she had been more alert she could have seen it coming and pushed him out the way) and loneliness (instead of her husband there was now just a dark chasm beside her) and fear (what would she become without him?), and she lay there next to the bed in a defeated heap, not even moving to hug her knees to her chest.

And then her hand slipped, and her fingers brushed against something under the bed.

Zoe froze.

Then she stretched her arm and reached further to pull the large, flat box out in front of her. Slowly, she removed the lid.

In the top of the box lay a worn but still respectable looking tuxedo. Wash had found it just hours before their wedding in a second-hand dealer's on Beaumonde. The grin on his face as he had run back up the ramp to where she was loading crates in the cargo bay was probably the widest she'd ever seen on anyone.

She stroked the material before laying it aside.

The other item in the box was her dress. She held it up, remembering what Wash had said to her when he'd finally seen her in it.

"Honey, you're always gorgeous, but I don't think I've ever seen you look so… _pretty_."

Zoe wiped her tears, and got dressed.


	3. Laundry

**Laundry**

Kaylee licked a drop of tomato -- tomato _flavored_, anyhow -- sauce off the back of her hand as she made her way downstairs and past the passenger dorms to the small storage room which served as _Serenity_'s laundry. Simon was stuck doing dishes again, so now was the perfect time to check on the load she had going in the washer.

The lower deck was quiet; most everyone was still sat at the table upstairs, talking after their meal. Kaylee began to hum to herself, and swung round the doorway.

She was already three steps inside before she noticed Zoe.

The first mate was sat on a crate which had been stored in a corner of the room long ago, then left there because it was such a convenient place to put a washbasket, or to sit on waiting for the washing machine to stop, as it seemed Zoe was doing now.

Except she wasn't watching the machine, and she didn't have any air of impatience about her. She was just sitting there, next to the wooden box she always used as a washbasket, and had taken a sheet half out of it and was clutching it with both hands, looking down at it.

"Zoe," Kaylee said apologetically. "Sorry, I didn't know you wanted the machine."

Zoe looked up. For an instant she seemed a million miles away, and then she focussed on Kaylee and gave her a quick smile. "That's okay."

Kaylee hesitated, feeling like she should say something else, but nothing seemed to come to mind so she turned to the washer. It wasn't spinning. She pulled her own washbasket off the top and started to unload it. "You didn't have to wait for me to come back, I don't mind if you take my things out..." she said.

There was no answer from Zoe, so Kaylee turned back to face her.

Zoe was silent a moment longer, gazing at Kaylee almost unseeingly. Then she blinked and shrugged slightly with one shoulder. "The sheets still smell of him," she said with a rueful smile. Kaylee saw her fingers dig a little tighter into the sheets' fabric and felt her throat constrict.

She swallowed. "Zoe..." she said, but trailed off almost as soon as she'd opened her mouth. How did you comfort someone like Zoe?

"Don't matter if I wash 'em or not, they ain't gonna smell of him much longer. Least this way they get clean." Zoe's eyes roamed slowly from her clutching hands to the basket, as if trying to see those small traces of Wash which she was about to erase.

Kaylee paused for a moment before perching on top of the washing machine so that she was sat opposite Zoe. "Well, I don't reckon Wash would want you sleepin' on dirty sheets," she said.

Zoe nodded her head once, looking off into the distance. "I always thought it would be me who went first," she said, not moving her eyes off whatever invisible remnant of him she was looking at. "Never really crossed my mind it'd be him. Knew it was _possible_... but I always worried more about what he would do without me, not what it might be like for me without him. Kinda stupid of me, really." She twitched her eyebrows and gave another small shrug.

"Zoe..." Again Kaylee trailed off, hesitating briefly before jumping back down to the floor and moving instead to sit next to Zoe on the crate, putting a hand on her shoulder. "You'll be okay. He ain't gone as long as we remember him, and we ain't gonna forget just on account of you washin' the sheets. In fact..." She paused here, not sure it was the right thing to say, but ploughed ahead anyway, "I reckon the more things we _wash_, the more we'll remember, because everythin' will be... Washed."

There was the smallest hint of a tear in her eye, but the corners of Zoe's mouth twitched upwards, and a sound which was almost a laugh came from her throat. Kaylee suddenly realized that she hadn't heard her laugh once since Wash had died.

Zoe stood, picking up her washbasket and putting it in front of the washer. She pulled the sheet she had been holding out and put it aside while she loaded the other items into the machine. Then she held it up to her face, took one last, deep breath of its scent, and piled it in with the rest of her laundry.

The sheets were washed.

Zoe smiled.

**The End**


End file.
